Posted
by
Roblimo
on Friday March 30, 2012 @08:26AM
from the millions-of-new-Facebook-users-coming-soon dept.

Roblimo writes "Assistant Professor Kurt DeMaagd, of Michigan State's Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media, runs a program that brings broadband Internet to villages in Tanzania that have never known connectivity better than what they get with non-smart cell phones. Lots of students are involved, and Kurt (who was one of Slashdot's co-founders many years ago) believes the students get as much out of the project as the people in Tanzania who are its primary beneficiaries. Setting up not only computer networks but also satellite communications and solar arrays in areas where you can't zip on down to the local computer or hardware store for parts you forgot teaches how to work under adverse conditions, and how to plan in advance instead of winging everything at the last minute. But we'll let Kurt DeMaagd, who is an engaging speaker, tell the story himself in this long (8:12) video."

There is way too much pressure on the teachers to take responsibility for their kids. They want the teachers to fill in the parental gap. Long term, that alone is a recipe for burnout. You make some very valid points, but there also need to be some other perspective changes from the administrative side.

My wife's a math teacher, who teaches primarily freshmen, with a high percentage of the classes having kids with learning disabilities. She's got attitude and behavior problems and is consistently sending the same kids to the office. If no action is taken to get rid of problem kids, how does that not engender an attitude of helplessness. If you can't take steps to make your situation better, how are you long term going to be motivated to try new things to get better results.

She's been teaching 5 years. She hasn't broken yet, but were I in her place... I'm not sure I'd be that resilient.

If you do things too well, there will be no impetus for management to change. If you don't have time to correctly fix the problems you are just continuing your pain. Many of those problems/hacks likely exist because the guy before you was trying to get them features as quickly as they wanted and it snowballed on him.

It will likely continue unless you can communicate with management. I personally speak in too much detail for non-technical people and this has been a huge hindrance. If you aren't speaking on their level of understanding, you're Charlie Brown's teacher.

I'm not saying don't put in extra time to fix things. I am saying if they are going to keep expecting you to work miracles, that it's abuse.

People undervalue technical work. You see someone building a house and you know that it is an actual object. It has 3 dimensions. It has running water and can withstand all sorts of weather. You have a visible, touchable result. With IT work, all your doing is typing in notepad or clicking on images to them. You're effectively building an iceberg.

To the non-technical, programs are anthropomorphic. The program thinks for itself and it reasons about a problem on its own. If you're consistently hearing "all you have to do is" after you've already explained what you have insufficient data in order to make a decision, you're not going to make them happy. They will forget your compromise and continue thinking in their terms without any basis in reality. In that case, run.

No matter how much VMWare is willing to pay, Novell can't afford to lose that part of the company.
They are already hardly relevant. They need SuSe and the clout they have to make sure that they have a suitable place to run all of their other software. I'd guess they'd have to get the whole company instead of just the SuSe division.

AT&T was supposed to release one(HTC Lancaster) at the end of July, but backed out with little fanfare. I dealt with a Blackberry with a non-working 0 for a month in order to get that one with my upgrade.... only to end up with another blackberry.

I wouldn't count on anything from AT&T until you can see it in the store.

Africanized honeybees, 'killer bees' have been found in the New Orleans area since July of 2005, but the regularity and frequency of finding them there is new cause for concern. Another confirmed positive Africanized honeybee sample in the New Orleans area indicates the bees are most likely established there now, according to the Agriculture and Forestry Commissioner.

Red imported fire ants may be killing as many as a fifth of baby song birds before they leave the nest, according to new research. Of the nests where there was no pesticide treatment protecting the baby birds from fire ants, only 10 percent of the young birds fledged and were able to leave the nests. Of the treated nests 32 percent of the baby birds fledged.

Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday September 12, 2007 @11:22AM
from the probably-not-skinny dept.

Muad'Dave writes "From the NASA News Release 'Today, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity entered Victoria Crater for the first time. It radioed home information via a relay by NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, reporting its activities for the day. Opportunity drove far enough in — about four meters (13 feet) — to get all six wheels past the crater rim. Then it backed uphill for about three meters (10 feet). The driving commands for the day included a precaution for the rover to stop driving if its wheels were slipping more than 40 percent. Slippage exceeded that amount on the last step of the drive, so Opportunity stopped with its front pair of wheels still inside the crater.' This marks the beginning of perhaps the greatest 'Opportunity' for new discoveries on Mars."

Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday September 04, 2007 @04:12AM
from the hands-off-my-camelcase dept.

Jerry Asher writes "Not all of my coworkers are careful about spelling errors. Sometimes this causes real embarrassment as spelling errors creep into software interfaces. Does anyone know of spell checkers for programming languages? I don't want a text spell checker, I want a programming-language-aware spell checker. A spell checker that I can pass all of my code through and will flag spelling errors in function names, variable names, and comments, but will ignore language keywords, language constructs and expressions, and various programming styles (camel code, or underscores, or...). I want a spell checker that knows that void *functionSigniture(char *myRoutine) contains one spelling error. Does anyone have such a thing for Java or C++? Are there any Eclipse plugins that do this?"